Morphological Changes of the Lower Ping and Chao Phraya Rivers, North and Central Thailand: Flood and Coastal Equilibrium Analyses

Abstract

Abstract The Chao Phraya River flows in the largest river basin of Thailand and represents one of the important agricultural and industrial areas in Southeast Asia. The Ping River is one major upstream branch flowing down slope southwardly, joining the Chao Phraya River in the low-lying central plain and ending its course at the Gulf of Thailand. Surprisingly, the overflow occurs frequently and rapidly at the Lower Ping River where channel slope is high, and in particular area, sand-choked is extensively observed, even in normal rainfall condition. In contrary, at the downstream part, the erosion of river bank and shoreline around the mouth of Chao Phraya River has been spatially increasing in place where there should be a massive sediment supply to form a delta. Here we use Landsat imageries taken in 1987, 1997, 2007 and 2017 to analyze geomorphological changes of rivers. Results show that both rivers have undergone the rapid decreasing of water storage capacity and increasing of sand bar areas in river embayment. The total emerged sand bar area in the Lower Ping River increases from 1987 to 2017 up to 28.8 km2. The excessive trapped bed sediments deposition along the upper reaches is responsible for the shallower of river embankment leading to rapid overflow during flooding. At the Chao Phraya River mouth, a total of 18.8 km2 of the coastal area has been eroded from 1987 to 2017.This is caused by the reducing of sediment supply leading to non-equilibrium in the deltaic zone of the upper Gulf of Thailand. There are several possibility implications from this study involving construction of weir, in-channel sand mining, reservoir sedimentation and coastal erosion management.